A self-portrait by the iconic Mexican artist Frida Kahlo has sold for a record-breaking $54.7m (£41.8m), setting a new auction milestone for an artwork by a woman. The surrealist piece, titled El sueño (La cama) — The Dream (The Bed) — created in the 1940s, depicts Kahlo asleep in a floating wooden bed beneath a skeleton wrapped in dynamite resting on the canopy. It was painted during one of the most turbulent periods of her life, shortly after her divorce and remarriage, and in the same year her former lover was assassinated. The psychologically charged work drew intense competition between two collectors at Sotheby’s, ultimately selling for more than 1,000 times its original 1980 auction price of $51,000. The sale surpasses the previous auction record for a female artist, Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed / White Flower No.1, which sold for $44m in 2014, and also breaks Kahlo’s own previous record of $34.9m set in 2021. Kahlo, who died in 1954, is revered as one of the most influential painters of the past century. Her self-portraits, shaped by lifelong physical suffering — childhood polio and devastating injuries from a bus accident — explore her fraught relationship with her body and identity. Sotheby’s noted that El sueño (La cama) is among the few Kahlo works available on the public market, as Mexico declared her art national monuments in the 1980s, restricting their export. Anna Di Stasi, the auction house’s head of Latin American art, said the sale highlights both the growing appreciation of Kahlo’s brilliance and the wider recognition of women artists at the top of the global market. Kahlo’s life and art reached a wide audience through the 2002 biographical film Frida, starring Salma Hayek, portraying her complex relationship with Diego Rivera and her physical struggles. The record-setting sale places El sueño (La cama) among the most valuable artworks ever auctioned, marking a historic moment in the art world.
Frida Kahlo’s Surreal Self-Portrait Smashes Records at $55 Million Sale
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